ecoculture, geophilosophy, mediapolitics

State of the Eco-Humanities, Take 1

This post is the first of a series of reflections on the state of the Environmental Humanities, or Eco-Humanities, and of where this interdisciplinary field might be headed.

A note on terminology: The term “Environmental Humanities” has caught on in ways that “Eco-Humanities” and other variations have not, but the debate between them has hardly occurred, so I will use those two interchangeably in what follows. The abbreviation “EH” works for both. I’ll leave open the question of whether the Eco-Arts deserve more explicit recognition, as in “Eco-Arts and Humanities” or “EAH,” or if they are a separate entity. I’ll also leave aside the fact that one could say all the same things about “Anthropocene scholarship” — which is even more interdisciplinary in its roots and scope.

With the rapid growth of the Environmental Humanities over the last 15 years or so, it’s a little surprising that there is as yet no obvious international forum or gathering place for EH scholarship — whether a scholarly society or a regular conference or meeting.

There have been meetings and conferences that have tried to articulate a vision for the Eco-Humanities. Mount Royal University’s biennial Under Western Skies is perhaps one of the best such regular meetings, though it doesn’t explicitly limit itself to the humanities. Other smaller conferences — like this one at the University of Washington and this one at Princeton, as well as the many that have been held at the Rachel Carson Center — have contributed to shaping the field.

There are also good reasons why an annual international conference has not been a priority for EH scholars. Or at least one reason: EH scholars tend to be very conscious of the carbon costs of the air travel such conferences entail. UC Santa Barbara recently dealt with that dilemma by organizing a “nearly carbon free conference,” with the drawback that most of the presentations were watched on a screen (and anyone who’s been to an academic conference knows that you don’t just go for the presentations).

“the traditional humanities – such as philosophy, literature, religion, art, music, history, language studies, cultural geography – conjoined in new interdisciplinary formations to address the environmental crisis currently engulfing us – its antecedents, current forms and future trajectories and possible responses to it.”

He later elaborates:

“The humanities (really it should be arts and humanities*) have always been committed to the study of nature, place, landscape, nature-society relations – the Environmental Humanities seek to deepen these traditions, combine them, and explicitly foreground them in interdisciplinary responses to the era of ‘ecocide’ that global life (Gaia) finds itself in.” [emphasis his, and vote in favor of *EAH duly noted]

And he adds that

“we need to find new forms of ecological narratives through which we understand ourselves, each other, our place in the world and those of others in interdependent ways. We need new ‘strange’ narratives which challenge human exceptionalism and a whole host of other blockages in productive thought (as Mary Midgley put it). We need new narratives and a new weave of narrative which have a centre of gravity far from where it is now.”

This basic structure of defining something with reference to a need — amounting to a kind of diagnosis of an ailment — followed by a proposed treatment or set of remedies, is something that new interdisciplinary fields have often followed. Think women’s and gender studies, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, and so on — all to some extent crisis-born fields, with the crises perceived to be broad enough to call for a general reorientation of scholarship across many disciplines.

This was certainly the case with the beginnings of Environmental Studies program building back during its first wave in the late 1960s and early 1970s. As part of the first cohort of doctoral students in environmental studies during its second wave of program creation (late 1980s-early 1990s), and as a co-founder of the Environmental Studies Association of Canada, I became very familiar with the lengthy debates one can have over the wording and terminology both of the “need” for the field (or in this case its ramping up to doctoral-level research) and of how it aims to prescribe ways out of the crisis that informs it.

At the same time, there’s no denying that the growth of EH is also a response to institutional pressure on humanities scholars to articulate their “relevance” to real-world needs. The question of whether the world needs EH or not lurks in the background of discussions of the field. Some field-defining statements speak boldly of “seismic shifts” being “currently underway,” so one of the debates (as Owain Jones notes) is over whether the field is responding to growing societal recognition of the need to deal more effectively with the eco-crisis, or if it is in fact shouting into the wind struggling to be heard, in a world that is hardly paying attention. If EH is configured as a “crisis field,” it becomes vulnerable to the criticism that it is “activist” and not “scholarly” in its goals. But at this point I think it’s safe to say that the world is in crisis and that ivory-tower disengagement is hardly the only viable option, if it is an option at all.

My own take on all this differs from Owain’s and others’ renderings mainly in wanting to more precisely define what it is that the arts and humanities can do. I would say that to deal with the Eco-Crisis, the looming Ecocide, the Sustainability Bottleneck, the Double Bubble, the impending upsurge of socio-ecological suffering associated with current Anthropocenic trajectories, and all of that, we need at least the following four things:

1. Technical knowledge: We need scientific data gathering — which remains, after all, the main source for how we know about the ecological and climate crises. We also need the engineering knowhow for addressing specifical technical challenges — in energy, infrastructure, and the like. Where scientists often think this knowledge is the main need, humanists would respond that we have plenty of it to work with; it simply isn’t enough.

2. Institutional Capacity: Actually dealing with problems requires having the organizational, institutional, and functional mechanisms for doing that at all levels — from the local to the regional, national, and transnational. We are beginning to develop institutional capacities locally in select places, and globally through international institutions (as we began to see in Paris last December). There are examples of nations taking the lead on policies. But there is a long, long way to go with all this. If, on a scale of 1 to 10, our “knowledge” (#1) has achieved a 7 or 8, our institutional capacity is hovering down somewhere around a 3, at best.

3. Coherent, integrative, and motivating images and narratives: Specifically, we need images and narratives that could reframe people’s awareness of their place in time and in space toward one that is more enabling of the radical actions that will be required in years to come. While many scientists tend to think that the arts and humanities are most useful for communicating scientific knowledge (#1 above) to the broader public, humanists and artists insist that there is a two-way movement between the two realms, and that working with image, discourse, and narrative is much more complicated and, in fact, autonomous from anything generated by #1. This area is, rightly, where the critical and creative work of Eco-Arts and Eco-Humanities scholars and producers has been primarily focused. But it isn’t enough.

4. Affective preparedness: No matter how much information, institutional capacity, and “storied imagery” there is, people will not move into action until they are affectively prepared for doing that. And until circumstances create an opening for it. Those circumstances tend to be rapid events: eco-disasters, political shock waves, or revolutionary situations that emerge unpredictably, revealing business-as-usual to be inadequate and calling for responsive action of one kind or another. Artists tend to be well aware of this affective level, but it needs more thought. There are crucial connections between it and the infrastructural — social media, organizational links between diverse groups around the world, and so on. But the sense of agency is separate and distinct from these. I would argue that it requires cultivating practices of a kind of “engaged Anthropocenic mindfulness” (or mindbodyfulness, for lack of a better word). This means cultivating the ability to see the ethico-political connections between things — between sociopolitical dynamics, local-global ecological circulations, and legacies of colonialism, racism, sexism, and oppression (of indigenous cultures, first and foremost) — in the midst of our own actions in the world. And the ability to act knowing how complicated these things are, and how the results of our actions will not be evident anytime soon.

Back to the place of EH, or EAH, within all this: While it works primarily within #3 and #4 (the latter less recognizably, but perhaps more importantly), it contributes to #1 and #2 as well.

“To turn to expert humanities researchers not for the depth of their knowledge concerning values and ethics, or historical trends in human thought and behaviour, but for their ability to translate a highly technical scientific message into the popular idiom is not unlike engaging an accomplished composer to tune your guitar.” [emphasis added]

I would expand on the first part of that sentence. EH certainly incorporates a depth of “knowledge concerning values and ethics” and concerning “historical trends in human thought and behaviour.” But it also includes tools for thinking the world differently — not as one would approach a mechanical problem that needs solving, but as one would approach the creative task of reinventing or recomposing a world from elements that are disparate, incongruous, and troubling.

These include tools that come from attending to the cultural particularities of histories that involve layers of colonialism, imperialism, racism, the decimation of indigenous peoples, the transformation of environments, and so on. Histories that propose alternative ways of organizing the relations between humans and nature. Histories that build not on a monolithic western narrative of progress, crisis, and resolution, but on multiple, locally rooted, and always rather hybrid socio-environmental (hi)stories of indigenous practice, colonization and transformation, waves of local-global network- and alliance-building — all culminating in the efforts made today to “recompose” a “common world” from threads that are far from common. Not all these things are recognized by all eco-humanists, of course, but I think they should be.

The role of the Eco-Arts and Humanities in all this is, as I see it, at least four-fold. It is

to expose current socio-ecological dynamics, including processes of “slow violence” and toxic injustice;

to collect and retrieve the stories being told by “peopled places,” curating accounts of their witnesses, elders, and storykeepers;

to remap them within global patterns (all those relational patterns and processes mentioned above); and

to envision, craft, promote, and build alternatives.

All of this is centered around the cultivation of agency. If there is a “revolutionary agent” in humanity’s rise to meet the Anthropocenic challenge, it is the Precariat with its allies — those who have shorn themselves of affective and material commitments to Anthropocenic “business as usual.” And it is in the cultivation of a sense of clarity, resolve, and responsiveness — through “engaged Anthropocenic mindfulness practices” — that the affective propensity for change can emerge in the wake of eco-disasters to come.

But Hartman’s statement might provide the basis for as good a manifesto as the Eco-Humanities need today:

We will not be your guitar tuners! We will (de)(re)compose the world! And we will do that from the ground — and gut — up!